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To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
„Great writers,“ those who constitute our canon (at any given moment, one should add warily, since aesthetic canons fluctuate considerably over time), have invariably been the focus of reception studies, partly because they provide the most fertile ground for research, but partly also because literary scholars (and in particular the aspiring doctoral candidate: I myself graduated with an influence /reception study of this kind) need some justification for their endeavors, and what better ticket into the ivory rower - or onto the book market - than the study of the most seminal and widely accepted authors? James Joyce is just such a „great author.“ And „James Joyce and German Literature,“ the subject of this essay, must inevitably result in some form of reception study. But just what form should it take? Within the limited space of one article, it would be impossible to survey in toto Joyce's influence on German literature; that is, the multiple receptions of Joyce by some four or five generations of authors writing in German.
The essay provides a contrapuntal "parallactic" reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Bildungsroman" Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - with its extensions Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre - and James Joyce's high modernist A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). Derived from astronomy, the term parallax designates, transferred to literary history, a narrative stratagem, a metapoetical rationale, and an interpretive method. Joyce employs it as a key concept and narrative tool in Ulysses to denote a stereoscopic perspective applied to the protagonists’ actions and the world they live in. Leopold Bloom thus refl ects on it and the technique of Ulysses is determined by it. On a higher plane, literary critics, too, engage in literary historical parallax whenever they read texts intertextually — as exemplified in this essay. A parallactic reading of the novels’ protagonists Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus, as regards not just their identification with Shakespeare’s Hamlet but also the symbolic connotations embedded in their names and mythological pretexts, allows us to shed new light on the roles and significance of narrative irony, chance, and paternity in these novels.
Tagungsbericht: Playing False : representations of Betrayal
16. bis 17. September 2011, Lincoln College, Oxford University
From antiquity through the present, from the political sphere to the most personal relationships, betrayal is a ubiquitous and multifaceted phenomenon. Because of its many forms, however, betrayal demands an intensive examination within an interdisciplinary forum that transcends the narrower, political or literary spheres of betrayal, and that strives to address the multiplicity of its representations, rather than reducing it to a single definition. It is precisely such a forum that the conference, "Playing False: Representations of Betrayal" created, which Dr. Betiel Wasihun and Kristina Mendicino organized.
European scholars, colonial administrators, missionaries, bibliophiles and others were the main collectors of Malay books in the nineteenth century, both in manuscript or printed form. Among these persons were many well-known names in the field of Malay literature and culture like Raffles, Marsden, Crawfurd, Klinkert, van der Tuuk, von Dewall, Roorda, Favre, Maxwell, Overbeck, Wilkinson and Skeat, to name only a few. Their collections were often handed over to public libraries where they form an important part of the relevant Oriental or Southeast Asian manuscript collections.
Therefore the knowledge of the intellectual culture of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay World in general depended very much on these manuscripts and printed books collected often by chance or in a rather unsystematic way. The collections reflect in a strong sense the interests of its administrative or philologist collectors: court histories, genealogies of aristocratic lineages, law collections (adat-istiadat as well as undangundang) or prose belles-lettres build a vast bulk of these collections, while Islamic religious texts and poetry forms popular in the 19th century (especially syair) are fairly underrepresented. Malay manuscripts and books located in religious institutions like mosques or pondok/pesantren schools have not been searched for; until today there are more or less no systematic studies of these collections. As in some statistics religious texts build about 20% of all existing Malay manuscripts, their neglect by Europeans scholars leads to a distorted view of the literary culture in the Malay language.
The present article analyzes a prominent yet relatively understudied contact space among Native American, New Zealand Maori, and aboriginal Taiwanese literatures: the struggle of indigenous peoples to negotiate optimal relationships between themselves and the natural world, particularly in light of capitalist modernity and globalization. Many indigenous narratives draw sharp distinctions between native peoples and outsiders, predictably portraying the former as protectors and the latter as destroyers of both nature and indigenous local cultures. The Native American Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan's (1947-) novel 'People of the Whale' (2008), the Maori writer Patricia Grace's (1937-) novel 'Patiki' (1986), and the aboriginal Taiwanese writer Topas Tamapima's short story "Zuihou de lieren" are no exception. But these texts also problematize notions of the so-called "ecological native." They do so most conspicuously by revealing the ambiguous relationships those peoples believed closest to nature have with the nonhuman world, that is to say their environmental ambiguity ('ecoambiguity') (Thornber 2012).
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
The reason is not small
(2010)
"Don’t forget the sugar!" my husband called after our son who was already running down the road, hopping across puddles and skirting garbage mounds. He leaned back in his chair and sighed. The plastic covered wires were stretching to the point that they would break soon. We would get it restrung again. (...)
This introductory analysis on the subject of werewolves in the Greek and Roman worlds in its legendary, mythical, scientific and medical dimension emphasizes an intrinsic combination of negative and positive aspects, human and non-human factors, and ancient and modern components, laying the groundwork for the study of the gendered duplicity of the werewolf's Self in the modern and contemporary literature of southern and northern Italy. In this presentation of the werewolf motif on the Italian literary panorama from the 19th to the 21st century through an overview of short stories and novels, we will examine the writers who have combined ancient rural legends with metropolitan reveries to underscore the complexity and obscure double life of the werewolf.